


group effort

by inverse



Category: Kuroko no Basuke | Kuroko's Basketball
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-05-06
Updated: 2014-05-06
Packaged: 2018-01-23 18:42:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,476
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1575632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inverse/pseuds/inverse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>how to build a well-oiled machine. touou gen, pre-winter cup.</p>
            </blockquote>





	group effort

1.

In his last year of middle school, Imayoshi had been approached by Harasawa for a recruitment talk. He had just finished his tenure as the vice-captain of his middle school basketball team, which had done well in the national junior high tournament, placing seventh, but he hadn’t expected to be called on by a school like this. Touou Academy wasn’t exactly a premier school in Tokyo, even though it was obvious they aimed to be one – very new, overly expensive, unsubsidised tuition fees, and needless to say the sports teams were still in a nascent phase. It would be interesting to listen to what the coach had to say, anyway. There was no shortage of other schools to go to.

“Well, I myself am newly appointed as coach, having been away from basketball since I represented the national team many years ago,” Harasawa said as they settled down in the office, inviting Imayoshi to sit down opposite him. “If you’re looking to play for a team with pedigree, then you might be disappointed. You must be wondering why such a young team is so blatantly trying to recruit from among the best in the country.”

“Not at all,” Imayoshi replied glibly. “In fact, I’m wondering – with all due respect – why you aren’t more ambitious, as a school that seems to be trying to quickly cement its status as an elite institution. As far as I know, the captain of my team has been contacted by several other schools in the country that specialise in basketball – and he is an excellent player in my opinion – but you’ve reached out to me instead of him! A vice-captain. I should be honoured.”

If Harasawa was put off by his rather mocking flattery, he didn’t show it. He sat back, twirled a curl of hair in between his fingers, and said, very straightforwardly, “I don’t see why we should have contacted him when it is you whom we are trying to recruit. I’ll be frank with you, Imayoshi-san. After much discussion with members of the team staff and some of the regulars, we would be very glad if we could have you on board. We have some very good players, but no excellent point guards, and your talents in that regard would be of exceptional help to our team. I’m not sure if you agree with me, but after monitoring some of the previous matches that your school has played, we feel that your gift has been – what is the word – underutilised.”

“Oh? I don’t mind it being that way at all, as long as the coach finds a way to win. I’m a very easygoing person.” He grinned.

Harasawa nodded. “Of course I’m sure that you are. Well, more precisely, Imayoshi-san, perhaps what I am trying to get at is that you will certainly appreciate the challenge in building a team that can rival the nation’s best. If you are given an instrumental role in managing the team in future – I make no promises, of course – wouldn’t you think that your intelligence and insight, both as a leader and a player, would come into good use? Certainly better than in other schools that are likely to select captains based on their physical ability, which I suppose is the reason behind your current appointment. Well, whatever it is, what I’m trying to say is that we would like you to be part of the effort to bring this team to greater heights. We are aiming to recruit other excellent players like you, and you cannot deny that the prospect of seeing a good team come together over the next few years is very exciting indeed.” He paused to let Imayoshi digest his words. “And you are quite mistaken about our lack of ambition. When it comes to achievement, we would like to teach our students to be greedy. This year we have ranked eighth in the region and nineteenth in the entire country. No mean feat for a team that is only two years old, you must admit.”

“Well, you’ve made some very persuasive points,” Imayoshi told him. He ran the content of Harasawa’s speech through his mind once more while Harasawa sipped from his coffee.

“Oh, yes. I nearly forgot. We happened to look through your academic background while we were trying to make a decision on whether to contact you or not. We noticed that you also possess exceptional academic ability. As you mentioned correctly before, Touou Academy is an institution dedicated to becoming one of the best schools in the region, if not the country. And that means that on top of focusing on the development of our school’s extracurricular activities, academic results must come first.” There were a few brochures sitting on the coffee table in front of him. He slid them towards Imayoshi. “If you don’t mind, we have several strategic partnerships with some of the best universities in Japan. You might like to consider our school’s strengths in this regard as well.”

 

 

2.

Two years later, Harasawa conducts a similar talk with one Aomine Daiki. Imayoshi has watched Aomine play before, both in recording and in person, and he is a monster among other lesser players, albeit a wounded one. He waits outside the reception to have an up close and personal view of one of the most highly-touted upcoming stars of the high school basketball circuit. Just as he expected, Aomine is reluctant and jaded. He will only be a burden if he carries on this way, and Imayoshi can see the disadvantages of having someone like that on the team, as previously discussed with Harasawa some time before. He doesn’t actually want to win. It’s something inevitable for him – it just happens, so he takes it for granted, with an attitude that would intimidate some, annoy most, and alienate all. The negativity would spread a mile wide. On the other hand, Aomine is the ace of the best team within the junior high circles. In fact, it is indisputable that he might be even better than many of those who came before him. Letting such rare talent go just like that would be a great disservice to the club. At the very least, Imayoshi is obliged to try something.

See, any school would roll out the red carpet for Aomine to welcome him, because they value him for his ability. If he joins them, their chances of progression would increase by leaps and bounds, and moving into the semifinals or even the finals of tournaments is almost a guarantee. The thing is that all of them start balking when they hear that he isn’t as committed – in form, at least; they wouldn’t know if he was equally uncommitted in substance – as they hope he would be. And if you refuse him because of that, you’re way off the right track. To convince Aomine to join your army, therefore, you would need to distinguish yourself. You would need to show him that you value him for something else. You would need to show him that he is the one who needs to fit into the ethos, not the other way round. Someone with so much pride can’t stand being slighted.

That’s why Imayoshi tells Aomine, when they meet outside in the corridor, that they don’t need him like all the other schools do. And if he doesn’t take the bait, then, well, so be it. He would be a nice bonus, but you can still have a good haul without landing a prize catch, especially if the prize catch’s only nice and shiny on the outside but rotten and mucked up on the inside.

 

 

3.

Susa is good at everything, which is why he readily makes way for Aomine by switching to small forward at the coach’s request. It’s not difficult to see the advantages of switching out a decent power forward for a power forward that virtually no one can beat, and there are no games of pride involved, because Susa’s ego isn’t in the way of anything. He’s always been a utilitarian kind of guy. Wakamatsu is incensed on Susa’s behalf, though. He doesn’t see what’s so great about Aomine, probably because he doesn’t even see Aomine much, and that’s because Aomine doesn’t come for practice, which is a condition that Harasawa has granted to him, as long as his form doesn’t suffer. Imayoshi thinks that Wakamatsu might only be this angry because he had to work his ass off to land a place on the regulars and Aomine comes waltzing in just like that, the free pass written all over his elite forehead.

Other than Aomine, there are two new additions to the team, both first-years just like Aomine, but Wakamatsu doesn’t complain about them because they show up. The first one is somebody they discovered by accident during shooting drills. His name is Sakurai, and Imayoshi doesn’t want to tell the nervous wreck of a boy, but he might have anxiety issues. Still, as long as he doesn’t mess up, which he hardly does when he’s concentrating on his shots. The first time they asked him to repeat his quick-release shot because they wanted to see what exactly it was that he was doing, he apologised and nearly cried because they thought they were going to kick him out of the club for being terrible. “Sorry,” he wept, “I shouldn’t have done that.” Every other sentence that anybody’s said to him since then produces roughly the same effect.

The other one is the new manager. Her name is Momoi and Imayoshi initially thinks that she’s just Aomine’s tag-along, until she presents him with files and notebooks filled with information and charts that she’s compiled over the years as Teikou’s manager.

“Very impressive,” he tells her. It’s a genuine response, coming from him. “I’d never have guessed that Teikou had a secret weapon like this, besides the regulars. Who taught you how to do this?”

“The captain of the basketball club,” she explains. “At the beginning he just wanted me to gather the information so he could read through it and analyse it himself, but I tried my hand at it and he said I was doing a good job. So I’ve done it ever since.” She waits while he flips through the pages, adorned with neat handwriting and detailed, colour-coded graphs. “If I could be of any help –”

“Of course you could. As long as you’re doing it for the team and not just Aomine.”

Momoi avoids his gaze.

Two days after the roster for the year is finalised, Imayoshi and Susa discuss it while they’re studying in the library. They take a break and look again through the list, which consists, of course, of the five regulars, and ten other substitutes, a mix from both the first and second strings.

“Well, well. Who would have thought that after investing so much in our human capital for the past few years, we’d end up having so many freshmen on the team? Bumper crop.”

“Does it matter who’s on the team as long as they help to score? I think a win might finally be in sight this year.”

“Why,” Imayoshi says, taking a jab at Susa, “I didn’t know you wanted it so badly. Sentimental much?”

“Not sentimental,” Susa corrects him without missing a beat. “Practical. It’d look great on my transcript if we won. It would be especially meaningful because we haven’t won anything since the inception of this club.”

 

 

4.

Nobody actually gets to see Aomine’s prowess in action until they start playing in official matches. The Interhigh preliminaries come first. Aomine ends up scoring more than seventy percent of all their points when he actually does bother to play, and that’s a lot of points – over a hundred each match, with the opponent regularly scoring below half of what they have. He barely even needs to try or exert himself. If they’re playing against a second-rate team, he doesn’t even bother to turn up. “Can’t you guys handle it by yourselves,” he would drawl. “I have better things to do than to handle small fry like that.” Better things to do, meaning lounging on the school rooftop doing nothing at all, according to what Imayoshi’s managed to wheedle out of Momoi. Aomine’s right, though. Against an average team, the other regulars are already more than a handful.

Needless to say, they win all of their matches, right from the start of the season. The post-match routine is almost always the same. Before Imayoshi can even get a word in for the debrief, Aomine’s already changed out, grabbed his bag, and exited the premises, and it always ends in Wakamatsu yelling the locker room down over how mad he is and people asking him to shut up.

It’s interesting how the dynamics in the entire club have changed because of Aomine’s arrival, though. Previously the club simply consisted of players who were of similar levels and who knew that they were extremely capable, at least in comparison to the status quo. Now, however, there’s a certain spirit of infallibility that permeates the atmosphere at practice, strong as steel. Not that any one of them are training any less or thinks that the team can’t lose. It’s simply that the results that they’ve produced so far are so stellar that losses, or even narrow wins, now seem like a statistical rarity.

Imayoshi actually has to admit that this is the best team that they’ve put together yet. The five of them, while never really bothering to engage one another unless absolutely required, play seamlessly, covering all the aspects of a game that could possibly be thought of. Aomine scoring most of the points in the front, Wakamatsu under the basket, Sakurai to score from a distance, Susa being able to cover everything else to a very decent extent, and even Imayoshi himself can manage a three-pointer or two when the time calls for it, besides trying to direct the flow of the game, if he even needs to tell the others what to do. This essentially means that they’re fully covered, both on the inside and the outside. Off the court, Momoi provides support by furnishing them with data and projections, a lot of which are dangerously and prophetically accurate. What makes all the difference, really, is the intrinsic discrepancy in talent and skill between the team’s members and other players. This is why they spend so much time trying to hunt down the nation’s best players – if you work with horrible raw material, you’ll never get something of good quality out of it. They’re all good enough – overwhelmingly so – to play alone and face off with other players on their own that it comes together like simple, precise arithmetic, like a minimal yet elegant mathematical solution with no frills or excess. Susa was correct. If they play it right, a championship might be in the cards.

A good team is like a machine. It doesn’t need much to operate. All an effective machine really needs is good parts and just a minimal amount of lubricant to get it working smoothly. Machines that need other things to operate – slick, excessive emphasis on teamwork and cooperation, spending weeks and months thinking of silly new tricks for inefficient players who don’t even do the basics well enough that they have to resort to something else; well, those are lesser machines, and they are trying to make up for the inherent faults in their mechanisms.

 

 

5.

It’s not until the end of the preliminaries that Imayoshi finds out that Aomine’s capable of much, much more, even though he’s already more than enough to deal with, even for the strongest players in the high school arena. The final league is approaching, but with Aomine’s seriously abysmal test scores, the school might just ban him from playing. Harasawa discusses this with Imayoshi, saying that even if the others are good enough to play against most teams with few problems, they might need Aomine in a pinch. Momoi ends up having to come up with a last-minute cheat sheet, which is refined with Imayoshi’s own effort, cutting the material down to the bare minimum, instructions provided for the questions that he easily predicts will come up on the exams, judging from the problems that have come up on past-year papers. Undemanding, foolproof shortcuts to get Aomine to where he needs to be, since he’s got shit for brains when it comes to anything that’s not basketball. Imayoshi just wants to make it easy for everybody.

“Are you telling me to cheat?” Aomine asks when Imayoshi presents him with it, a stack of papers that hardly comes up to ten pages. Imayoshi had no idea he had so much integrity, or maybe he was just foolhardy enough to believe that he could pass, just by his own effort.

“Why, would you like me to teach you how to?” he replies, giving Aomine a smarmy, ingratiating smile that would be sure to make anybody’s blood boil over. “I would if I could trust that you’d be able to do it without getting caught. Consider these some useful tips from me. I’m just telling you to read it through, just in case. There would be a lot of trouble for everyone if you’re banned from playing and we wouldn’t like that at all, yes?”

“I couldn’t care less about what anyone thinks,” Aomine snaps, but he takes the file anyway.

“Don’t mention it,” Imayoshi says in response to Aomine’s lack of gratitude. He isn’t actually expecting Aomine to catch the sarcasm, but he’s much sharper than what Imayoshi’s prepared to give him credit for. He narrows his eyes and begins, “Y’know, I know you’re the captain and you’re a lot smarter than that fucking idiot Wakamatsu, but you keep talking to me with the attitude that I owe you something.” _Who’s giving who attitude now,_ Imayoshi thinks, but he just smiles blandly and takes it in as Aomine continues. “Got a minute? Let’s go to the gym. I’ll show you something that’ll shut you up.”

Aomine voluntarily setting foot in the gym – unimaginable. Imayoshi’s got a tutorial in half an hour, he could probably make it in time, and besides, he’s curious. When they reach the premises Aomine fishes out a basketball from the rack and says, “You’re on defence. Mark me.”

“Hey, now. This is just insulting. You obviously know I can’t stop you from scoring.”

“I don’t care if you can or not, just do it.”

Imayoshi humours him. It’s standard Aomine fare, from the feint to the uneven acceleration to how he dodges just a few feet away from the basket to score as he’s leaning back away from Imayoshi. Extraordinary to see up close, but nothing special that he hasn’t already done before. He dribbles the ball back into his hand, walks back to the centre of the three-point line and says, “Not bad at all. Again.”

This time, something is off. There’s an electric vibe to Aomine that wasn’t there before, an almost manic energy that radiates off his entire body, slack, lazy, relaxed, yet coiled and immensely powerful, like a predator ready to leap into action. Imayoshi is waiting. And then it comes – Aomine, charging towards him, then past him, like a rampaging beast, so quickly that he’s bewildered as to how all of it is happening at once. He almost loses his balance trying to turn and catch up, but it’s too late. The ball’s already in the basket, having hit the backboard so hard that it continues vibrating even long after the ball has reached the ground, making a sound like a tense, snapped violin string, amplified several times. He is, to put it simply, shocked by what’s just happened. He spends a good few seconds trying to process everything.

“This is what I’m talking about,” Aomine says. His eyes are gleaming. “You amateurs are always talking about how I’m not committed to training, as if it’s something that I owe you guys. Think about it harder. You should be grateful that I’m here at all.”

“My, my,” Imayoshi remarks to himself. “What do we have here?” His blood is pumping, but not because he’s afraid or intimidated. Momoi had once told him that Aomine would never lose, and it had certainly seemed that way because of the results that they were getting, but Imayoshi was doubtful as to the absolute certainty of the statement, as if it was objective truth – what Aomine had displayed was simply exceptional physique and exceptional technique, taken to the very extreme. But this is something else altogether. Now he believes Momoi, and he believes Aomine.

 

 

6.

No matter how good a team they are, though, the honour of being highlight of the year still goes, in aggregate, to the rest of Aomine’s miraculous friends. There are several other teams that share the spotlight, routinely taking up space in the basketball magazines as journalists scout out the other members of the Generation of Miracles – Shuutoku in Tokyo, Kaijou in Kanagawa, Yosen in Akita, and Rakuzan in Kyoto.

What Imayoshi doesn’t expect is that there’s another team they should be looking out for. “Seirin High,” Momoi briefs them – Harasawa, Imayoshi and Susa – after they come out on top of Block B for the Interhigh preliminaries, before they face off in the final league. “It’s where the sixth man of our middle team school went. The phantom sixth man of Teikou, if you’ve heard of him.”

“I didn’t actually think he was real,” Susa comments, and Momoi continues, turning her notebook around towards them so they can all read, “He’s not the only one you need to look out for. They’re a very well-rounded, cohesive team of talented second-years, formed only last year –”

“I recall,” Harasawa interjects. “I might have watched one of their matches.”

“– and they have a new addition this year, a freshman as well. I’ve observed some of their matches and he’s got excellent reflexes. Great jumping ability, able to pull off strong dunks. If you don’t mind, I have some recordings that you can watch.”

Unfortunately, nothing goes right for Seirin, however cohesive Momoi makes them out to be. Despite the big talk about pulling ahead before Aomine arrives, they’re just not good enough, their ace struggles through the match with a leg injury and is finally subbed out, and when Aomine finally turns up halfway through he basically renders the invisible boy completely useless. Not that they actually needed his help doing it. They defeat the other schools in the final league in similar fashion afterwards. From then on it seems like it’s straight on towards the finals. Aomine sustains a slight injury in the quarterfinal against Kaijou, where another of his contemporaries is residing, and it is, admittedly, a tough match – the first time they play against another one of those Miracle kids for real. Aomine plays so hard to the point of straining himself, and he doesn’t use what he demonstrated to Imayoshi before, even though it’s plain that he’s able to do it at the snap of a finger. For all the bravado, there’s just something holding him back. They progress anyway.

They play in the semifinals against Yosen – without a livid Aomine, who causes a fuss when he learns that he’s been taken off the team temporarily for his injury – but Yosen’s pulled the ace off the game for one reason or another as well. Still, it’s Touou’s win, and who cares if they won without putting all their resources on the table and having a real showdown? A win is a win is a win. They’re stopped, regrettably, at the finals, by Rakuzan. Aomine’s former captain is there, sitting on the bench on the opposite side of the court, not playing, but watching every move the players have to make, both the ones on his team and on the opponent’s. Second in the Interhigh is an encouraging result, however, and bodes well for the next tournament to come – the Winter Cup, where they’ve been seeded as a result for placing in the Interhigh.

Which is why Imayoshi simply can’t resist the opportunity to want to gloat when he finds out, courtesy of Momoi’s intel, that their first opponents for the Winter Cup is Seirin. That’ll be a rematch to look forward to. Even better, they find out that Seirin’s booked a spot for the same resort where they’re planning to go after a practice match. Things just happen to your advantage sometimes.

“If you’re planning to skip out on the match against Josei tomorrow,” he tells Aomine casually at practice, “we’re visiting the hot springs afterwards. Remember Seirin? Momoi-san tells me that they’ll be there, too. Might want to say hi to your friends. Do come along.”

After they give Seirin the shock of their lives – they were probably looking to begin the Winter Cup on a fresh start – Imayoshi and Susa find Wakamatsu and Aomine trying to kill each other in one of the corridors between some of the guest rooms. Wakamatsu is wielding an empty milk bottle, his face red – sometimes Imayoshi worries for his blood pressure – and Aomine is staring at him with utmost contempt, as if trying to will one of Wakamatsu’s blood vessels into bursting. Momoi is holding Aomine back and Sakurai looks like he’s about to faint or cry or throw up, or all three at the same time. There is a distressingly blue sheen to his face.

“You young ones sure get along well,” Imayoshi sighs, drying his hair with a towel.

“I swear,” Wakamatsu barks at Aomine, “if we weren’t on the same team, if Coach wouldn’t suspend me for it, I would’ve punched your face into a bloody pulp a long time ago, you disrespectful little shit –”

“Probably called him a baldie again,” Susa mumbles under his breath.

“Okay, alright, break it up,” Imayoshi says. “You’re disturbing the other guests. Sometimes I wonder how we’ve managed to come so far as a team with the two of you within a fifty-foot radius of each other.”

“As if you’re able to interrupt any of my plays. Just don’t get in my way, idiot.”

“Same to you, asshole!”

“Well, as long we’re all on the same page,” Imayoshi shrugs as Susa drags Wakamatsu away, saving Sakurai from having a panic attack. There’s only a month to go to the Winter Cup, but it seems like all they need to do is to double on the drills and practice menu, and nothing else. They might not be friends – some of them might not even want to acknowledge that they’re teammates – but for what it’s worth, at least they have a common understanding, and that’s really all that is needed.


End file.
